This a great list, but, perfect? I don't know about that :) Stories aren't a magic bullet. However, applying these elements and telling the right story+right time+right audience... can make an emotional connection with your audience that impacts your business.

Miley Cyrus and Jimmy Hoffa were trending on Twitter this morning, at least in the United States and at that precise moment in time. In and of itself, this information is interesting, if not somewhat giggle-inducing.

My favorate quote: "When Dickens was writing his novels, and they were serialized once a month, he read all the letters that came in. His novels were actually a real dialogue with his audience. He was writing to entertain them, and he got paid by the word, and he wanted them to be pleased. But he also wanted to make sure that they got the story he was trying to tell."

This paper reports the findings of a meta-interpretation into of the emergence of a new learning design concept and its positionality within the learning and teaching theory landscape. The purpose of this examination of the concept of ‘connectivism’ is to ‘dig for nuggets’ and contribute new knowledge to the current debate about the validity of ‘connectivism’ as a new and emerging learning theory. The deconstruction and systematic analysis of the concept ‘connectivism’ is based on a newly developed coding system that is also applied to other, established learning theories, providing a comparative evaluation of commonly agreed properties of well-known learning theories. The results of our analysis are discussed and possible implications for practice and further research are outlined.

With MOOCs on the mind we have to see if Connectivism is a theory or just a new twist on Constructivism. Most recognize that we are facing a new world of instructional modalities but that we just don't have enough data to know what it all means yet.

Who is connnecting? That is an important question. I know a number of people who connect and what they have to offer is limited at best. An important consideration is creating praxis as we make meaning of theory in real-life situations.

The chatter around the need to improve education in the U.S. has been going on for decades, but it looks like something is finally going to happen. Why? Because the business model of higher education is truly under attack.

"The New Media Consortium and Open Universities Australia jointly released theTechnology Outlook for Australian Tertiary Education 2013-2018: An NMC Horizon Project Regional Analysis. This report applies the process developed for the NMC Horizon Project, with a focus on identifying and describing emerging technologies likely to have an impact on teaching, learning, and creative inquiry in tertiary institutions across Australia. Twelve emerging technologies are recognized across three adoption horizons over the next one to five years, as well as key trends and challenges expected to continue over the same period, giving campus leaders and practitioners a valuable guide for strategic technology planning. View the work that produced the report atwww.aus.wiki.nmc.org."

Thanks to URL shortening and redirection services, not all links are what they appear to be. Such shortened or redirected links take you to a different URL, which can possibly be malicious in nature as well. Extensions like WOT that tell you if a site can be trusted or not can be quite helpful for regular URLs but when it comes to shortened ones, such extensions have their limitations.

URL Uncover is a web service that helps you check how safe a link is without having to visit it. You simply paste the link into it, and URL Uncover will run it by the McAfee SiteAdvisor to check if the domain is a trusted one. It will also generate a screenshot of the website that the URL links to, and pull the title, description, and keywords of that page from its metadata.

URL Uncover is simple to use; when you find a link that you’re suspicious of, be it a long URL or a shortened one, copy and paste it into the URL bar of the service and hit ‘Uncover’. URL Uncover will check the link and load the title, description, keywords, and a screenshot of the resulting web page. In addition, it will also tell you the credibility of the domain by running it through McAfee SiteAdvisor, along with showing you the IP address of the website and checking if it’s listed on Spamcop.

The service works well as far as reporting the safety of a link is concerned; however, for shortened URLs, the service’s Pro version (which doesn’t ask you to sign up or pay anything at the moment, unlike what the term ‘Pro’ may suggest) is unable to load the title, description, and keywords of a website. The non-pro version has a more modest interface, but it actually worked better than the Pro version in our testing, except that it failed to load a screenshot of the website.

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.